Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Today we're very excited to announce a new addition to the team, a newposition for an existing member, and the triumphant return of an oldfriend!

First things first, we have found the first of our new hires! Max Goodman, aka Chromakode is joining the reddit team full-time. Max has been working with us for a long time; you probably know Max as a reddit moderator and the developer of reddit's first browser plugin, Socialite. Like all reddit admins, he's a longtime, active member of the community. Max is a programmer with an eye for design and UI, but knows how to solve problems with only minor changes. He'll be working with us to make reddit elegant and easier to use. Here are a few words he'd like to share with you:

I've been addicted to reddit for nearly a quarter of my life, and I'm thrilled to finally begin spending my days working on it. My goal is to improve the reddit experience to best serve you, the community. I'll be working on improving reddit's user interface to be better for new users, power users, and coders alike, as well as providing better tools for our communities. I'm also a huge supporter of open source reddit -- without it, I wouldn't be here!

Feel free to send me a ping on IRC if you'd like to connect. Let's build some amazing communities together. :)

But that's not all! Erik Martin, aka hueypriest, our esteemed Community Manager for the last three years, has been promoted! He's finally seen the light and is leaving the east coast behind to join the team in San Francisco as our General Manager. He also has a few words for you:

To quote Hugh Laurie from his pre-House Blackadder days, "I'm as excited as a terribly excited person who has a really good reason for being terribly excited." reddit's future is limitless, and I'm inspired and grateful to have the opportunity to be an even bigger part of it. reddit puts the community first, so it's no coincidence that my role as community manager has evolved. I'll still be handling most of the community manager duties, but my new job will be to champion our most important assets: our amazing community and our outstanding engineers. I'll also be leading the launch of new products for sponsors and partners (ping me if you're interested in learning more). /r/NYC will always be front paged for me, but I'm looking forward to making /r/San Francisco my new home.

But wait, there is still more! We're very happy to announce that Alexis Ohanian, aka kn0thing, reddit's co-founder, has returned as an advisor to Condé Nast and to reddit.

Of course, none of this would have been possible without the amazing reddit community. Without your support and participation, all we would have is a bunch of servers and some code. We'd like to thank you once again for your tremendous support, via participation, buying reddit gold, merchandise and advertising that doesn't harm the user experience. Stay tuned, as in the next few weeks we'll be announcing more new team members as we finish up this round of interviews.

Everyone please help us celebrate by welcoming Max, congratulating Erik, and welcoming back Alexis!

Spores were given out throughout the day to progressively larger groups. At first, reddit gold subscribers each received a spore. Next, active submitters and commenters got a spore the first time they visited. Finally, every remaining user who logged in got spores to give out. As the spores spread among the population, so did the mold. Right up until the very end.

(all times in Pacific Daylight Time)

By the end of the day, 270,845 people had received a total of 282,743 mold spores. No one was safe. The victims ranged from famousredditors, to people who made cool stuff, to flat out beggars. Even the poor reddit account got molded 69 times.

For that mold timey feel, go to /r/basement where you and over 1,200 other moldies can chat about how moldy it is.